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Obey Glow Tee

Obey Military Elite Tee-shirt Green Glow

For this season, Obey have released a special glow in the dark t-shirt project using specially formulated illuminating inks that glow for up to four hours with just a few minutes of exposure to natural or artificial light. Prints appear white in the daytime by night, glow either florescent green.

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Obey Engineered High Fidelity Tee-shirt, Black
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Obey Military Elite, Green Glow Tee-shirt
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Sale - Obey Army Cap
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Obey

Andre the Giant Has a Posse is a street art campaign based on a design by Shepard Fairey created in 1986 in Charleston, South Carolina which has since developed into a successful clothing brand called OBEY clothing.

Originally distributed by the  skate community, the Andre stickers began showing up in nearly every big city across the U.S.A. Later, when Fairey was a student at the Rhode Island School of Design, he released his manifesto and declared the campaign to be "an experiment in phenomenology." Over time the artwork has been reused in a number of ways and has become a world-wide movement, following in the footsteps of Ivan Stang's Church of the SubGenius and World War II icon "Kilroy Was Here". Fairey's work has since evolved stylistically and semantically into the OBEY phenomenon.


Fairey and campaign co-author Ryan Lesser, along with Blaize Blouin, Alfred Hawkins, Mike Mongo Nicholl, and Michael Meinhart  created paper and vinyl stickers and posters with an image of the wrestler André the Giant and the text "ANDRE THE GIANT HAS A POSSE 7' 4", 520lb", as an in-joke directed at hip hop and skater subculture, and then began clandestinely propagating and posting them in Providence, Rhode Island and the Eastern United States.

By the early 1990s, tens of thousands of paper and then vinyl stickers were photocopied and hand-silkscreened and put in visible places throughout the world, primarily in culturally influential urban settings in the United States, such as Philadelphia, Boston, New York City, Atlanta, Austin, Los Angeles, Sacramento and San Francisco, but also in places which travellers often visited such as Paris, Greece, London, Mexico, Argentina, Japan, Istanbul and the Caribbean Islands. In effect, Fairey and associates were creating a 'posse' of a wide audience of those who were in on the joke and willing to spread the message, and those who were not but found the original image compelling.


Threat of a lawsuit from Titan Sports, Inc. in 1998  spurred Fairey to stop using the trademarked name André the Giant, and to create a more iconic image of the wrestler's face, now most often with the equally iconic branding OBEY. The "OBEY" slogan was not only a parody of propaganda, but also a direct homage to the "OBEY" signs found in the 1988 cult classic film, They Live, starring Roddy Piper. About "Obey," San Diego Union-Tribune art critic Robert L. Pincus says Fairey's work, "was a reaction against earlier political art, since it delivered no clear message. Still, “Obey” was suggestively antiauthoritarian." "Following the example set by gallery art, some street art is more about the concept than the art," writes The Walrus (magazine) contributor Nick Mount. “'Fuck Bush' isn’t an aesthetic; it’s an ethic.

Over time, Fairey's artistic imagery has evolved into a sometimes subtle, sometimes not, parody of a range of iconic styles, mostly a juxtaposition of popular political propagandas and multi-national commercialism. It usually bears the text OBEY Giant but has since expanded into including cultural and influential icons from many eras.

In addition to countless small stickers, OBEY Giant has been spread by stencil, murals, and large wheatpaste posters, covering public spaces from abandoned building faces and street sign backs, to commercial spaces such as billboards and bus stop posters. Furthermore, the popular "OBEY" slogan and stylized André The Giant face continues to be reproduced on products ranging from art and clothing to home accessories and decor, considerably expanding the impact of the campaign through iconology based on an allegiance to media and popular culture in the guise of counterculture.